Ash Echoes — a mobile gacha game spun off from the beloved Gujian (古剑奇谭) RPG franchise, developed by ZLONGAME. After just 87 days since launch, the devs have already issued a groveling apology — and a very sincere one at that. But if you think one apology can erase 87 days' worth of spectacular mismanagement, think again.
Let's start with the character models. The dev team once boasted about their aesthetic superiority and next-level 3D modeling. In practice, though...
When players saw this 'dynamic duo' of models, everyone had the exact same reaction —
Yes, this is what their ultimate ability animations look like in the official PV. ZLONGAME's 'premium aesthetics' immediately filtered out a chunk of the playerbase. Those who stayed needed nerves of steel.
To be fair, the actual gameplay is genuinely fun — building card decks, crafting synergies, and challenging bosses is engaging and addictive. During the first gacha banner, things were still fine. Theorycrafters discovered new team comps, lore fans discussed the story, and everyone was vibing.
Then Spring Festival arrived, and ZLONGAME's one-man disaster show officially began.
The festival brought 3 new banners and a promise of 100 free pulls — 10 per day, accumulated over the event. Sounds decent, right? Except when the event banners went live, a bug instantly dumped all 100 pulls on players at once. That's right — nobody on the dev team bothered to QA the holiday event before pushing it to production.
But wait, it gets worse. Lore fans eagerly pulled on the Spring Festival banner expecting beloved legacy characters. Imagine a 'Legend of the Condor Heroes' (射雕英雄传) gacha where you're hoping for the iconic couple Guo Jing and Huang Rong, but the rate-up features Guo Jing paired with... Muci — a far less popular character. And on top of that, ZLONGAME made Muci drastically stronger than Guo Jing.
Lore fans flooded the forum in agony, saying it felt like getting randomly kicked by a dog while walking down the street.
During winter break, it was the theorycrafters' and gameplay enthusiasts' turn to get kicked. The fun of Ash Echoes lies in building diverse deck strategies — but ZLONGAME decided players shouldn't enjoy themselves too easily. They raised the card level cap, creating an absurd grind that forces players to invest in only one playstyle. Other strategies? You can only imagine how they'd work, because progression resources are nowhere near enough to build multiple archetypes.
And the kicker: even whaling doesn't help. Progression resources literally cannot be purchased with real money. This is a game where mega-whales pay top dollar to buy... frustration.
Above is a whale's ragequit message on the forum. Theorycrafters and gameplay fans went on an 800-page rant, equally describing the experience as getting kicked by a random dog.
Finally, let's talk about bugs. Ash Echoes was marketed as a 'years in the making, meticulously crafted' game. Turns out the meticulous part was the sheer volume of bugs — stars in the sky would be jealous.
Within less than two months of launch, searching 'bug' (bug) on the dedicated sub-forum returned 9 full pages of results. Many of those posts were player-maintained bug compilations — a single post might list over a dozen unique bugs. Years of closed-door development with zero testing, relying entirely on players as unpaid QA volunteers.
A week after the holiday ended, only a tiny fraction of bugs had been fixed. Most were still wreaking havoc in-game. The dev team had the bandwidth to launch a new gacha banner every 11 days, but not to fix bugs.
A player on the dedicated sub-forum compiled a list of ZLONGAME's greatest hits — 18 confirmed disasters in 87 days. That's roughly one screw-up every 3 days. Other gachas could never.
That compilation post was promptly nuked (deleted) by the sub-forum mods. But a player managed to grab screenshots before it disappeared:
The comment section was equally spicy. User @hydra105 noted: 'This game has been live for 87 days — during Spring Festival it was so invisible that nobody even realized it had been running for 80 days.' Others brought in even bigger dumpster fires from other games, saying 'Ash Echoes is nothing compared to this.' One commenter bluntly asked why the models look 'blurry like PS2-era resolution.' User @晏城南 made a sharp point: in otome games, gacha cards don't gate character strength, so single-character mains can skip banners freely — but in waifu gachas, banner pressure and meta dependency make FOMO far more punishing.
Some tried to rationalize ZLONGAME's behavior: 'Tencent-affiliated games seem to have crazy KPI targets lately — Genshin Impact is doing the same thing.' Others recalled the pre-launch hype: 'I still remember the daily hype posts on the general board — great revenue, amazing gameplay, lots of waifus. How did it all fall apart over one holiday?'
Let's close with the original poster's parting words: 'Tremble before the greatness of ZLONGAME. Other games could never.'
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